Originally posted on January 8th, 2018 in Trade Secrets a blog from Nature Biotechnology. Click here to view the original post. The biggest graduation for an academic researcher comes without diplomas or Latin superlatives, caps or gowns. It’s the leap from academia to business, the shepherding of our beloved ideas and inventions out of the…

“What kind of CEO do you want to be?” That question still rings in my head. It came after a meeting with a CEO that I’d attended with my dad, one in a string of meetings to match small biotech and health tech companies with potential investors. My dad, an investor, was letting me flex…

EpiBone is hiring! Which shifts my mind from the usual scientific questions of “What,” “Why,” and “How” to the often more challenging question of “Who?” Who best suits a certain role? Who completes a team? Who is who they seem to be? A seasoned entrepreneur/investor, Cyrus Massoumi of Zocdoc, recently led me one step closer to an answer. While…

EpiBone is participating this week in the BioFabricate conference, an international gathering at Microsoft Technology Center in New York City to showcase cutting-edge progress in what we can build with living materials. So I’m feeling extra celebratory about the growing synergy between biology and design. At EpiBone, we’ve solidified the connection between creativity and science with our artist-in-residence…

New York City is known for many things, and any self-respecting native will noisily rattle them off. The Big Apple is a center of culture and finance, a home of great art and music, a setting for incalculable movies and TV shows, an intellectual nirvana, and the home of the best pizza on the planet. But…

I’ve spent years as a biotech cheerleader, trumpeting the idea that biology can power innovation across diverse industries. Lately, I’m getting the feeling that experts in lots of other fields are also taking up the cheer. Case in point: Techonomy, the annual conference in Palo Alto that explores how technology is integral to the economy…

What is an artist doing working in a cutting-edge science lab? That’s a question I hear almost every time I explain my summer internship at EpiBone. Fortunately, I feel my whole life has been preparing me to answer it. I have always sat firmly at the intersection between art and science. My best subjects in school were…

What are the possibilities of what we can achieve when we start using biology as a tool to innovate? This was at the heart of my recent TEDMED talk ( which now you can watch online) and the follow up Q&A I had for TEDMED Blog. As innovators, thinkers and multidisciplinary explorers, we should all embrace and be curious about biology…

Back in late 2013, Krisztina “Z” Holly, the “entrepreneur-in-residence” at the LA Mayor’s office, invited me to participate in an interesting study being conducted by the National Academy of Engineering — the topic? Facing America’s innovation challenges. We discussed new educational paradigms, compared notes in our diverse fields. Themes revolved around the important role universities should play…

EpiBone’s home, the Harlem Biospace, hardly looks like a hub of cutting-edge science from the outside. The imposing brick façade sits right behind a taxi stand, across from a taco shack, down the street from legendary jazz clubs and an architecture firm and a live poultry shop, at the confluence of a rainbow of train…